In 1230, Pope Gregory IX instructed Raymond Penyafort (d. 1275), a Catalonian Dominican educated at the University of Barcelona, to codify the former collections of Canon law into a single, authoritative texts. This effort became the Decretals of Gregory IX, otherwise known as the Liber extra. The manuscript is an early (c. 1260) version of the Decretals, which is of particular interest because of its unusual small size, indicating that it was designed for portability and ease of use possibly by a student of law in the University of Paris. If owned by a student, the student had the ability to commission his copy with illuminated, probably historiated, initials which have since been excised. Though the margins are clean for the most part, there does exist some early marginal annotation in a contemporary or near contemporary hand.